Global Justice and Regional Metaphysics: On the Critical History of the Law of Nature and Nations

Abstract

A good deal of the recent historiography of the early modern law of nature and nations—jus naturae et gentium—has been critical.1 This applies in particular to the literature that ties its history to the emergence of European colonialism and imperialism. By “critical” I do not mean pejorative or condemnatory—although much of the scholarship has been this too—but critical in the philosophico-historical sense of positing norms that project a history of what jus naturae et gentium should have been or could have become, as opposed to a history of what it contingently happened to be. Antony Anghie thus criticizes the imperialist complicity of early modern jus gentium by projecting a global international justice whose “promise” it might have realized but did not.2 Yet defenders of jus gentium in relation to colonialism rely on the same kind of critical or philosophical historiography as its critics. Their central claim is that at least some versions of jus gentium did indeed embody norms of global justice, which made it possible to condemn European colonialism as unjust.3 The many postcolonial critics of early modern jus gentium and its occasional philosophical defenders thus share a fundamental philosophico-historical platform: namely, that there is a global principle of justice capable of including European and non-European peoples within the “universal history” of its unfolding.